When I was growing up, I was fascinated by apprenticeships – really! I was an avid reader of history, ancient and otherwise, and apprenticeships always meant adventure. One could apprentice with Greek philosophers, British knights, Teutonic alchemists, and farmers, tradespeople and barbers (who were also doctors). You could apprentice in a household or a business. And once your apprenticeship was complete, you commanded respect as a trained and educated person with skills to play a useful role in society.

Apprenticeships have always been a stepping stone for both a good job and a great story. Those tantalizing tales I read as a kid centered, mostly, on a young person’s indenture to some mysterious craftsperson and it always lead to mischief: wild chases, first-time love affairs, and messy screw-ups. But they also led to the apprentice learning about life, love and labor – specifically the skills to be someone you weren’t before, but better.

The master-storyteller, Walt Disney, even got into the act when he produced the iconic movie, “Fantasia,” with a scene called The Sorcerers’ Apprentice, which to this day still spooks me. There are also plenty of modern-day books about apprentices: “The Apprentice” (Lewis Libby), “The Apprentice” (Tess Gerritsen), “The Apprentice Series” (James Bryan Smith) and “Rangers Apprentice” (John Flanagan), to name just a few, and a TV show by that name as well (I know I don’t need to tell you who stars in that!). In the modern vernacular, the term sorcerers’ apprentice, was immortalized by “The Sorcerers’ Apprentice,” a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe written in 1797.

Heading into the final stretch of a year-long trial run, the experimental net-zero energy house at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Md., must overcome an energy deficit of 154 kilowatt hours—equivalent to about $20—during the month of June.

The facility was designed to produce at least as much energy as it consumes over the course of a year. At the end of May, the research residence still owed on its total energy bill, which averaged less than $2.00 a month over the first 11 months. In contrast, the monthly expenditure for electric power alone averaged $129 for Maryland households in 2012, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

In 2009, for example, the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, emergency departments in the United States treated more
than 250,000 sports- and recreation-related traumatic brain injuries, including
concussions, among children and adolescents—a figure that’s risen by 60 percent
in the past decade.

At the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST), we recognize that the use of advanced materials in
protective equipment, such as helmets, can play a critical role in this effort.
For that reason, NIST is investing $1 million per year for 5 years on tools to
accelerate the development of advanced materials that can provide better
protection against concussions for the athlete.

Sports equipment often leads the way in adopting new
advances in materials—think of carbon nanotubes in high-end tennis rackets and
golf clubs. But modern materials science offers the possibility of specifically
designing new materials, from the ground up, that are tailored to the special
needs of helmets and other protective equipment.

As an example, “shear-thickening suspensions”—specially
designed particles suspended in a liquid polymer—can be a high-tech shock
absorber that instantly adapts to offer greater resistance to stronger shocks.
You’ve encountered a sheer-thickening suspension if you’ve ever tried to stir
cornstarch in water quickly.

Other possibilities include micro- or nanostructured
materials that either absorb shocks by crumpling in specific ways, rather like
some automobile components are designed to protect passengers in a crash, or
that selectively deform to channel the energy of shocks away from highly
sensitive areas, like the skull. Self-healing polymers and shape-memory metal
alloys can both provide reinforcement and extend the longevity of the
equipment.

With more than 80 percent of the world market residing outside the U.S., there is clearly great opportunity for U.S. companies to find new customers and grow. But it is much easier to enter or expand into new global markets with partners who have resources and can help guide the way.

As part of the Commerce Department’s efforts to help U.S. companies increase exports, the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership (NIST MEP) and the International Trade Administration’s (ITA) U.S. Export Assistance Centers offer ExporTech™. Since 2007, ExporTech™ has assisted hundreds of businesses across the country to increase export sales, establish new partnerships, expand production facilities and hire more employees.

The program brings in partners such as District Export Councils, state trade offices and other federal, state, and local agencies to efficiently connect companies with a wide range of experts that help them navigate the export sales process.

Manufacturers can sign up for ExporTech™ through their local MEP center and, over the course of nine weeks, each company is guided through the development of an export strategy, both through group workshops and individual coaching. At the end of the program, the business has an export plan that is vetted by a panel of experts. Many participants generate export sales within six months of completing the program.

ExporTech™ builds connections to a team of export organizations that help participating companies find the right markets and implement their export growth plans. It amplifies the impact of other export programs, helping companies get the most out of tradeshows, ITA’s Gold Key services, country visits and trade missions.

To date, there have been more than 90 ExporTech™ programs in 28 states with more than 500 participating companies. Those companies have hired an average of five new employees, seen nearly $800,000 in average export sales increases, saved an average of $50,000 in costs and investments, and seen new and retained sales of $400 million.

ExporTech™ is just one example of the Commerce Department’s commitment to helping more American businesses export to more markets. Just yesterday, Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker announced NEI/NEXT – a data-based, customer service-driven initiative that will build on administration-wide achievements under the National Export Initiative (NEI) to help all businesses reach the 95 percent of consumers who live outside the United States. To learn more about NEI/NEXT’s strategies to help U.S. businesses capitalize on new markets, visit http://www.trade.gov/neinext.

The funded projects will identify and rank research and development goals, define workforce needs, and initiate other steps toward speeding technology development and transfer and improving manufacturing capabilities. Project collaborations span a wide variety of industries and technologies, from flexible-electronics manufacturing to biomanufacturing and from pulp-and-paper manufacturing to forming and joining technologies.

"The AMTech awards provide incentives for partnerships to tackle the important jobs of planning, setting strategic manufacturing technology goals, and developing a shared vision of how to work collaboratively to get there," said NIST Director Patrick Gallagher. "These are essential first steps toward building the research infrastructure necessary to sustain a healthy, innovative advanced manufacturing sector—one that invents, demonstrates, prototypes and produces here, in the U.S."

Technology roadmapping is a key component of all funded projects. Each consortium will engage manufacturers of all sizes, university researchers, trade associations and other stakeholders in an interactive process to identify and prioritize research projects that reduce shared barriers to the growth of advanced manufacturing in the United States.

This week, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker met
with the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) Steering Committee 2.0 and
the Manufacturing Council to discuss issues affecting the health of America’s
manufacturing industry, including progress on the National Network for
Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI).

In his 2013 and 2014 State of the Union Addresses, President
Obama called for the creation of a nationwide network devoted to innovating and
scaling-up advanced manufacturing technologies and processes to create good
paying jobs and spur economic growth. These efforts, known as the National
Network for Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI) consist of regional hubs, bringing
together companies, universities, community colleges, and government to
accelerate the development and adoption of cutting-edge manufacturing
technologies for making new, globally competitive products. The President has
asked Congress to authorize a one-time $1 billion investment—to be matched by
private and other non-federal funds—to create an initial network of up to 15
hubs. Over the span of 10 years, he has proposed building out NNMI to encompass
45 such hubs.

Significant progress has already been made to accelerate the
development of the NNMI. In January, President Obama announced the selection of the Next Generation Power Electronics
Manufacturing Innovation Institute, headquartered at North Carolina State
University, to lead a manufacturing innovation institute for next generation power electronics. It is focused on enabling
energy-efficient, high-power electronic chips and devices by making wide
bandgap semiconductor technologies cost-competitive with current silicon-based
power electronics. President Obama also announced two additional
institutes in February – the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation
Institute, headquartered in Chicago, and the Lightweight and Modern Metals
Manufacturing Innovation Institute, headquartered in the Detroit area. These
announcements build on the NNMI pilot – the National Additive Manufacturing
Innovation Institute, now known as America Makes – launched in
August 2012 in Youngstown, Ohio.

Potentially valuable drugs slowed down by sticky molecules may get
another shot at success. Joint research by the National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST), Genentech, the University of Delaware
and Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) has revealed the reason why a certain
class of proteins tends to form clusters that lead to high viscosity in
drug solutions.

The newly published results* could help drug companies create a
variety of cancer and autoimmune disease treatments based on monoclonal
antibodies, whose stickiness can make them difficult to administer
through thin needles.

Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) are Y-shaped
protein molecules that hold great promise for disease treatment. In
principle, the tip region of two of their "arms" can be engineered to
deliver attacks on tumor cells without harming surrounding tissue,
making mAbs less dangerous to the body than standard chemotherapy, that
kills both healthy and cancerous cells. However, a roadblock in the way
of their bright pharmaceutical future as a subcutaneous injection—the
preferred delivery technique—is their high viscosity: in solution, some
mAbs become so viscous at required high concentrations that they are
nearly impossible to inject.

The
Commerce Department is home to some of the world’s leading scientists and
engineers that are tackling some of the biggest challenges facing our planet
and doing great work to ensure our nation remains the global epicenter of
innovation. Earlier today, President Obama honored six NIST and NOAA engineers
and scientists with the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and
Engineers (PECASE) at a ceremony at the White House. The award is the highest honor
given by the federal government to outstanding scientists and engineers in the
early stages of their careers. The Commerce scientists are part of a group of
102 scientists from across federal agencies that received the prestigious
award.

PECASE awardees are selected for their
pursuit of innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology and
their commitment to community service as demonstrated through scientific
leadership, public education, or community outreach. The winners represent
outstanding examples of American creativity across a diverse span of
issues—from adding to our understanding of the most potent contributors to climate
change to unlocking secrets to some of the most pressing medical challenges of
our time to mentoring students and conducting academic outreach to increase
minority representation in science fields.

Big Data and Open Data are all the rage these days. However,
Commerce was into Big Data before Big Data was cool. As far back as 1790, we
began collecting data on patents in the U.S. and the Census Bureau conducted
the first Decennial Census the same year. In 1870, the National Weather
Service was created – which today is one of the biggest data producing agencies
around.

Back then, our economy was based largely on
agriculture. Over the years, our economy evolved through the industrial
revolution, later giving rise to the strong service sector. Today, we are at
the nascent stages of the next era in our economic growth, the information age.
On a daily basis, there is an ever-increasing amount of data becoming
available, and the demand for data is increasing exponentially. We have
before us both great opportunity and fascinating challenges to understand how
best to harness this national resource. This is a key focus of Commerce’s Open
for Business Agenda.

You may not know it, but the Department of Commerce is home
to many agencies that are your primary source for data that you likely use
every day.

For example:

How many people live in the U.S. or in your
hometown? You might know the Census
Bureau is the authority on population, but did you know the Census Bureau’s
data goes well beyond just population? Census also produces huge volumes of
data on our economy, demographics, and fascinatingly insightful data describing
our communities – or, if you are a business, your customers.

The Bureau of
Economic Analysis is a little know agency that produces key economic data
and many of the closely watched economic indicators that move markets, drive
investment decisions and guide economic policy. Do you know which industries
are the leading sources of income in your community, or to your customers? BEA
data can tell you.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, or NOAA, is your primary source for weather, ocean and climate
data – they are collecting data every minute of every day from land, sea, and
even spaced-based sensors. When you hear the local forecast or hear about severe
weather warning, that is NOAA data informing you about your environment in real
time.

The National
Institute of Standards and Technology, locally known as NIST, is our
nation’s authority on broad swaths of scientific, cyber, and physical data –
including, officially, what time it is.

We also have data on patents going back more
than 200 years at the U.S. Patent
and Trademark Office, which is a gold mine of inspiration for innovation.

Other agencies in Commerce provide data on economic
development, minority
businesses, trade,
and telecommunications
and the Internet.

On any given day, the Department will generate in excess of
20 terabytes of data, and sometimes much more. Yet, we think we can do more
with this resource. We want to take every step we can to open access to it to
the entrepreneurs and innovators of America, as we are pretty convinced that
there is huge unmet value and potential. We understand that a huge part of the
value of data is when it is not seen alone, but as part of a rich tapestry of
information. We believe that there is great opportunity to solve problems,
innovate new businesses, and improve data-driven decision-making, and we are
committed to that path.

That is why I was so glad to be a part of today’s launch of
the Open Data 500 Project,
housed out of the GovLab at NYU. This exciting project has verified what we
were certain must be true: That hundreds of American companies are using
Commerce data every day to innovate and deliver important goods and services to
their customers.

NIST-F2 would neither gain nor lose one second in about 300 million years, making it about three times as accurate as NIST-F1, which has served as the standard since 1999. Both clocks use a "fountain" of cesium atoms to determine the exact length of a second.

NIST scientists recently reported the first official performance data for NIST-F2, which has been under development for a decade, to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM), located near Paris, France. That agency collates data from atomic clocks around the world to produce Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the international standard of time. According to BIPM data, NIST-F2 is now the world's most accurate time standard.

For now, NIST plans to simultaneously operate both NIST-F1 and NIST-F2. Long-term comparisons of the two clocks will help NIST scientists continue to improve both clocks as they serve as U.S. standards for civilian time. The U.S. Naval Observatory maintains military time standards.

Both NIST-F1 and NIST-F2 measure the frequency of a particular transition in the cesium atom—which is 9,192,631,770 vibrations per second, and is used to define the second, the international (SI) unit of time. The key operational difference is that F1 operates near room temperature (about 27 ºC or 80 ºF) whereas the atoms in F2 are shielded within a much colder environment (at minus 193 ºC, or minus 316 ºF). This cooling dramatically lowers the background radiation and thus reduces some of the very small measurement errors that must be corrected in NIST-F1.